Arguo Ergo Sum, Motherfuckers

"I Argue Therefore I Am" is the Superpower of the Democratic Party

I was born to be a Democrat.

You know how that happens. The male Democrat displays his concern for the working man and the female Democrat responds by revealing her belief that health care is a right and then the next thing you know they’re having little Democrats. When, as babies, we cry, it is not for ourselves but rather it is for the suffering of others. Then, after a while, we go to school and meet other Democrats and start to fight with them and that is how we come of age.

My development was stunted a bit because I grew up in a very Republican town in suburban New Jersey. Lots of folks who worked on Wall Street. There was one other Jewish family across the street and we considered it a ghetto.

Yes, being Jewish has something to do with being born a Democrat. That’s not to say there aren’t Republican Jews. There are. You’ll be able to see some of them next week when Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu comes to visit Washington.  Oddly, Netanyahu is the leader of Republican Jews in America. So, they will come to pay their respects to their leader by pretending he is not a war criminal. As Republicans, they are use to pretending their leaders are not criminals so this comes naturally to them.

Arguo Ergo Sum

But as a non-rich, non-Wall Street, non-crazy-frum (“frum” means religious or pious in Yiddish) Jew living in New York, I found myself in a big community of other liberal Democrats. I disagreed with them about a huge number of things which helped me realize that I belonged. I even worked for a Jewish Democratic Congressman from Brooklyn in one of my first jobs. He was a man named Stephen Solarz and he represented places like Coney Island and Midwood but he was interested in foreign affairs which was why I was drawn to work for him. He was young and smart and a mensch and I learned a lot from him in the short time I worked for him. I saw Democrats in action. There was the young ambitious State Assemblyman who occupied the seat previously held by Solarz, a bright Harvard grad with limitless ambition named Chuck Schumer. There were the local power brokers from orthodox Jewish communities and the unions and we would go and meet with them and communicate in the way that comes most naturally to both Democrats and Jews. We would argue.

Later, working in the Clinton Administration I got to see other communities that make up the Democratic universe up close and I came to realize that it was possible to argue with people regardless of their race, color or creed. And yet…and yet…here’s the thing about Democrats…and it was a special thing about the Clinton Administration…it was through the arguments that we took good ideas and made them better, that we tested concepts before we turned them into policies and actions. It was a kind of a pissed off version of the Socratic method.

And candidly, having been raised as I was to debate virtually any issue within an inch of its life (“No, Dad, the pepperoni on the pizza is not Italian. Pepperoni was invented by Italian immigrants to New York in the early part of the 20^th Century.  I called the Deli Docent at the Museum of  Soppressata in Lower Manhattan to confirm it.”) I actually enjoyed the process. So did Bill Clinton who was famous for running policy meetings like seminars, hashing out issues for hours in part because he and almost everyone in the room enjoyed it--General Colin Powell and a couple others excepted.

But I do understand that not everyone is comfortable with the process. I often find myself in alien environments (like far away countries or the Midwest) where people comment on my being aggressive and I dial it back. Now some of that may just be that I am from New Jersey, a state in which “fuck you” is often used as a holiday greeting. But I get it.

The General Freak Out

I can sense that now with the general freak out over the debate over whether Joe Biden should remain the Democratic Party’s candidate for the 2024 presidential election.

There are a lot of people who argue that the debate is tearing the party apart. In fact, there are so many, that I am telling you right now that no matter what side of the issue you are on, I’m not going to get into the nitty gritty of it here. It’s too controversial and the shouting and invective will spoil my chill Friday night vibe. (Not chemically induced. I have never used drugs. I’ve never had to. I’ve always found anxiety was enough to get my heart beating in the morning and exhaustion was sufficient to help me wind down at night.)

Instead, I want to say a couple things. First, relax. The food fight will be over soon. A candidate will be agreed upon, the disagreements will subside and everyone will unite behind them. Second, being Dems we will emerge stronger from this. This period of questioning is all related to a core question which happens to be the right core question: How can we ensure we not only beat Donald Trump in November but that we do so resoundingly, that we give him and MAGA nation the thumping they so richly deserve and that the nation requires if it is to remain the America we all know. 

But there is a bigger issue lurking at the heart of this discussion. And it is one that deserves some reflection.

We Don’t Want to Be a Cult of Personality

I’ve heard talking heads and the Twitterati and many fellow Democrats comment that one reason the Dem debate is so damaging is that we appear fractured and fractious and that the GOP is united in support of their candidate. There seems to be a little cult of personality envy out there folks and if you have ever felt a twinge of it, I urge you to take a cold shower and get over it.

In fact, the way the Republicans have become one man’s party, shaped in the image of their candidate, swearing loyalty to that one individual is not just a sign of incipient fascism, it is one of the fundamental differences between the two major political parties in America.

The GOP, after all, are not just the party of Trump. They are also the party promoting the idea of the “unitary executive,” a monarch-like president who sits atop a government that answers to him. Democrats on the other hand recognize or should recognize that the seniormost position in our system of government is the citizen, the voter. The president works for us. He or she is accountable to us. That is one of the main reasons the Revolutionary War was fought and it is a concept that Americans have defended with their lives for the past nearly 250 years.

As it happens, the idea that one individual can actually run the entire U.S. government—which is the largest, most complex organization on the planet earth—is ludicrous. It takes not one but many leaders working collaboratively to run a government. It takes not one but many public servants to reflect the views of a large, complex society.

The Democratic Party is therefore not only not all about our president or presidential candidate of the moment. To succeed, it must be about a large group of professionals committed to shared ideals and goals working to serve a much, much larger group of bosses—the public at large. We should not be, must not become, a party that places loyalty to any one individual ahead of the mission that has brought us all together, that has made what we agree on far more important than our disagreements but must also make a respectful hearing of those disagreements a central part of how we serve a profoundly diverse society.

They have taken blended their cult of personality with their authoritarian impulses and brought this country to the brink of autocracy. (Or returned us to it. After all, as I noted before, that was the state we rebelled against in the first place.) We Democrats ultimately offer the better answer for the country precisely because we are not about any one individual, we are not about blind loyalty to one person’s ideas. We are about capturing and embodying the spirit of democracy of finding a way to serve the many by representing, listening to, acting on behalf the many.

It drives me crazy when people dismiss big problems by saying things like, “It’s all good.” (Also “my bad” is super-irritating but that has nothing to do with this and I will have to get to it some other day.) But sometimes, when it’s true, it’s not only ok to say but useful to remind ourselves. 

What Democrats are going through now is all good. It is just what we should be discussing. It will make us stronger. It is absolutely certain we all share and will work for the goal of defeating Trump. And that brings me to my last point. Which is I believe we will win in November and not just by a little and, just as importantly, I know we will be ready to better serve the people of this country than the alternative offered by the other cult-like party.